The Best Scene in After Hours: A Kafkaesque Nightmare

Every Wednesday we show you a great scene from film history you may remember, you may not — and then we break it down for you.

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Toward the end of Franz Kafka's The Trial, a priest tells Josef K a parable called "Before the Law." It tells the story of a man who is denied entry to an unspecified door by an intimidating gatekeeper, who nevertheless encourages the man to try everything in his power to gain admittance. He may attempt to bribe him, the gatekeeper explains, but only so that he may feel he has tried everything. He may attempt to overpower the gatekeeper and enter the door by force, but from there he will find an infinite number of guards to be passed in turn, each more powerful than the last. The man, told that he may be permitted to pass through the door at some point in the future, waits out the rest of his life sitting on a stool before the door, hoping that his time will one day come, until finally, exhausted and taking his last breaths, he sees the door closed forever.

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Martin Scorsese's great, underrated dark comedy After Hours features a scene that alludes heavily to "Before the Law": Lowly word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), denied admittance to a trendy punk-rock bar called Club Berlin for seemingly no reason, attempts to bargain with a distinctly Kafkaesque bouncer to no apparent avail (the bouncer accepts a bribe and even tells Paul that entrance in the future "is possible, but not now," a direct quote from the source text). But there is an earlier scene in After Hours that, though less explicitly referential, captures the essence of "Before the Law" more effectively than the holdover at Club Berlin. Paul, trying to make his way home across the New York City in the middle of the night and in a downpour, is dismayed to find that the subway fare has gone up as of midnight — meaning that the 98 cents to his name is no longer enough to cover his trip.

Tired, desperate, and more than a little irritated with this unexpected course of events, Paul tries his best to reason with the toll-booth operator, who flat-out refuses to cut him a break. When Paul asks if he can make an exception this one time on account of nobody being around to see him break the rules, the operator explains that he might lose his job. "Well, who would know, exactly?" Paul asks. The operator counters: "I could go to a party, get drunk, tell somebody." This is a far cry from the calmly benevolent gatekeeper barring us from the door to the law, but the tone of this scene taps into something unique not only to "Before the Law" but to all of Kafka's writing: the absurdity of the situation, at once amusing and horrific, has the logic of a nightmare, as when the simplest courses cannot be navigated for reasons beyond our control. And there is, of course, a hint of the cosmic in this ridiculous obstruction, as if the toll price had been raised simply in order to make Paul's life more difficult at the precise moment he most badly wants it to be easy. It's a too-common feeling — that the machinations of daily life are somehow conspiring against us, preventing us from reaching our goals for no reason — and it's one that Kafka traded in throughout his career. That this scene can so vividly express this sensation, in all its frustration and horror and absurd comedy, is part of what makes After Hours so remarkable.